aspects of being a professor at mines is
working with students as they make
connections in the mid-2000s riding a
wave of post-911 interest in public
public issues and global issues students
started to ask a whole new set of
questions I’ve been here 20 years and
mid 2000s was a turning point and those
questions were absolutely different than
the ones they were asking before one of
those questions was from a student
sitting across from me in my office how
do I take my interest in engineering and
combine it with my passion for social
justice engineering social justice I was
both baffled and intrigued it was that
question that was planted by multiple
students in the middle of the 2000s that
ended up being launching a journey that
lasted over ten years that journey is my
story today it’s the story that took me
to the National Academy of Engineering
to work on two National Science
Foundation grants and also to publish
multiple papers and a forthcoming book
so this combination of engineering and
social justice was something that
students were looking at and for me
what’s rewarding about my job is working
with people who are curious hardworking
and determined to find answers and
that’s a great description of mine
students in their first year here they
asked really important questions like
will I make it here will I make friends
here do I belong and in their final year
here they asked congratulation get here
any sooner and after graduation will I
ever use differential quit equations
again and more importantly where will my
engineering and science career take me
next in between that first and last
at mines a lot happens and a lot of
passions are ignited and nurtured last
year in a survey of mine students this
group of set of passions came up from
the survey and what you see there is a
tremendously wide array of interests
that mine students have and want to
engage while they’re here that that
particular set of interests is
interesting to me because I’m a
professor in humanities Arts and Social
Sciences and I want students to be able
to be whole people to engage these in
multiple parts of their curriculum one
aspect of this process is working with
students as they ask really really
important questions like who and what is
engineering for who is best served by
engineering who is constrained by
engineering how can engineering be a
force to benefit and help prosper those
who were traditionally underserved those
kinds of questions became very
fascinating to me and again those seeds
were planted by students in the mid
2000s the next stop in this journey came
about as a result of my work on
connecting engineering and sustainable
community development my colleague is
and I were working on this book when we
received an invitation to a workshop at
the National Academy of Engineering in
2008 and that particular workshop
featured people working across multiple
lines and one of those was people
connecting engineering and social
justice and while we were at this
workshop we realized that this
connection is something that we have not
made in our own work but it filled in a
missing dimension and we met the author
at this workshop of this book
engineering and social justice donna
riley and we watched as donna riley and
several others had very intense
sometimes heated debates with the head
of the army corps of engineers and
others who were there
whether engineering and social justice
should be separated or whether as she
argued in this book
they’re already inherently intertwined
what we need to do is just acknowledge
that reality when we came back to campus
we were so curious about whether
engineering and social justice have a
connection and whether they are
commensurable or incommensurable fields
of practice so we did what good
academics do when they’re curious we
wrote a grant and this grant led us to
work on an NSF grant from 2009 to 2013
in that grant we learned a lot but one
of our key take-home pata points was we
defined engineering for social justice
and this gave us a very clear set of
objectives and also means by which to
achieve those objectives and once we had
that clearly in mind we were able to
evaluate different engineering projects
in terms of the degree to which they
engaged some of our criteria another
thing we encountered in our research is
a disjuncture between engineering
practice that is what engineers do and
the way in which young engineers are
educated that is engineering education
the disjuncture actually comes from
thorough research on engineering
practice and what it finds is that
people who stayed in engineering that is
more than 10 years actually found a
tremendous amount of joy in connecting
the social and the technical and making
that connection very much part of their
work in fact one of the leading studies
concludes by saying most people found
these challenges of the social socio
technical to be the most interesting in
their work but this made us wonder okay
so if indeed research on engineering
practice accentuates problem defining
and solving on really complex open-ended
socio technical problems where do
students learn that in their in
education so we began to look at
different engineering curricula
including one of our own this one and
many others and you of course you can’t
see the boxes here but this particular
section has all of the core technical
core courses so chemistry physics
calculus and then it has upper division
courses in this case it’s mechanical
engineering so statics dynamics etc and
so we asked is that socio technical
integration and problem definition
happening there or is it happening over
here in the design courses or is it over
in my neck of the woods in the
humanities and social science courses
what our analysis found is that here in
the big space where most of the credits
our students encounter mostly technical
predefined closed-ended decontextualized
problems over here in my neck of the
woods we did the exact opposite we
divorced the we focused on the social
but divorced it from the technical with
a few exceptions in both cases primarily
the socio technical integration happened
inside design courses so here and here
but if you’ll notice those are a
minority of the overall curriculum it’s
a very small percentage so that made us
wonder okay how do we address this issue
and more importantly what’s blocking
that socio technical integration well
the easy answer was engineering courses
are very technical and often my
engineering colleagues tell me there’s
more technical content that can possibly
fit in any given semester and that’s
true but it’s an incomplete answer a
more complete answer acknowledges
engineering ideologies and engineering
mindsets and those are up here in the
interest of time I’m going to talk about
two ideologies and two mindsets in
engineering so let’s start with the
first one technical social dualism so
this one comes from a book in which an
author of one of the chapters looked at
how a particular ideologies which are
circulating in engineering in
but are often invisible to most people
it’s kind of like the fish in the water
we inhabit this water but we don’t know
we’re swimming in it these ideologies
help us often hinder us from thinking
about social and justices so one of them
is technical social dualism which is
just the idea that the technical and the
social should remain separate that they
are not overlapping circles on a Venn
diagram but two completely different
domains which of course was the opposite
of what we found in our studies of
engineering practice in about 25 years
of research into science and technology
studies what they found was many of the
case studies showed just the opposite
that there was an assumption of Technol
technical social dualism when in fact
the two were inextricably intertwined
the next ideology is called
depoliticization
which I had to practice five times so I
could say it this is the idea that
politics have nothing to do with
engineering even though engineering
happens in a social context it is not
something that occurs in a vacuum
it happens in the society and therefore
it it shapes and is shaped by politics
but D politicization suggests that those
remain completely separate if you look
at this technological artifact you might
just say okay so it’s a short-handled
hoe big deal how could that be political
how could that have cultural historical
social dimensions but if you unpack the
history of this particular technological
artifact what you find is that it was
used as a technology of control so that
the migrant workers in the fields would
have to be hunched over and the foreman
could see from a laura long distance who
was working that is who was bent over
and who was not and also it was a way in
which they ensured because it’s a non
economic position and it’s not easy to
talk when you’re hunched over like that
that workers couldn’t talk about things
they couldn’t talk about forming a union
or getting better wages or anything else
for that
that that was shut down and in that
sense
Langdon winners research reinforces why
the technology which may itself seem
neutral actually was part of a regime of
power Authority and control now that’s
an extreme example in most cases Technol
technologies and their political
dimensions are much more subtle and in
fact one of the authors of this that
discussed this ideology reinforces that
they’re often implicit in norms and
ideologically infused processes of
problem definition and solutions so an
example is we often focus our
technologies on low-cost mass use but
that itself has ideological dimensions
to it Saudi politicization basically has
this idea that the political and the
cultural and the historical and the an
engineering need to remain separate but
that’s going to keep people from
thinking about how can engineering and
social justice work together the next
step in our journey involved writing yet
another grant this one to integrate
social justice concepts inside the belly
of the beast
the technical curriculum specifically
one course called feedback introduction
to feedback and controls which is
required if you’re in mechanical or
electrical engineering and this
particular course gave us an opportunity
to say instead of seeing this as a
zero-sum game where it’s either students
have technical content or they have
social justice exposure we looked at in
a completely different way
how could social justice dimensions help
students learn the technical better
that was our research question in this
research process and one of the things
we encountered is that students are very
very used to another form of technical
problem solving where the problem comes
to them predefined they don’t have to do
any of the problem definition that’s
that turns out to be critical among what
engineer engineers in the workplace do
that
it’s that complex negotiation between
clients communities and other
stakeholders about what is the problem
in the first place because each of those
stakeholders has different a different
sense of what the problem is and what we
found is that when students get hundreds
sometimes thousands of predefined
problems in their engineering curriculum
it makes them have an uncritical
acceptance of authority because they
think someone else gives me the problem
I just solve it but it’s not that simple
problem definition is a crucial
dimension in engineering practice the
final the final mindset is a Willington
willingness to help and unlike the other
ideologies and mindsets this one is an
opportunity not a barrier a willingness
to help is basically this idea that
anyone who’s been around engineers for
as long as I have or or or even longer
recognizes that there’s a helping spirit
here engineers are problem solvers they
say I see a problem I want to make a
difference and that helping spirit is
fundamental to good social justice work
like this work with a group of minds
engineers building a bridge connecting
two villages in Central America so this
willingness to help becomes absolutely
crucial in helping students learn how
problem definition and engineering and
social justice really have lots of
significant overlaps one of the biggest
takeaways from our research was came
through interviewing juniors and seniors
and sitting down with them in interviews
and focus groups and asking them what
role do you think the social and the
technical play a year or two from now
when you’ve graduated and you’re out and
you’re actually in engineering practice
and their comments were oh yeah that’s
something that’s really important both
the socio technical and social justice
are important dimensions for practicing
engineers and then we asked them what
exposure did you have to socio technical
dimensions and social justice in your
undergraduate engineering education and
most of them told us that with a very
few exceptions
they have limited to no exposure and we
see this as an opportunity to integrate
engineering and social justice across
different components of the curriculum
where it’s most relevant and some places
are much more relevant than others our
future work looks at how engineering and
social justice can work in three
particular components of the oven
engineering curriculum so in engineering
design the engineering sciences and also
humanities and social sciences courses
for engineers so one of the things I
want to do is circle back to the
mid-2000s when a group of students
walked into my office and said how do we
make this connection between our
interest in engineering and our passion
for social justice first of all if there
any alumni in the room and you were one
of those people come find me today
because I want to thank you and shake
your hand this particular research has
been pivotal for me it’s changed the way
I teach and what I teach it’s changed
the way I do research and the way I see
this connection between engineering and
social justice and in particular what
engineering can do to leverage social
justice for a better future I also want
to thank the National Science Foundation
for supporting us through two of their
grants and most of all I want to give a
big shout-out to CSM students past and
present for doing what you do and for
your intense curiosity which has a
ripple effect on us professors thank you
very much I appreciate it [Applause]